Oldport Days | Page 9

utterly
gone. You cannot conceive yourself to be watching something which
merely turns on an axis; but it seems suddenly to expand, a flower of
light, or to close, as if soft petals of darkness clasped it in. During its
moments of absence, the eye cannot quite keep the memory of its
precise position, and it often appears a hair-breadth to the right or left
of the expected spot. This enhances the elfish and fantastic look, and so
the pretty game goes on, with flickering surprises, every night and all
night long. But the illusion of the seasons is just as oquettish; and when
next summer comes to us, with its blossoms and its joys, it will dawn as
softly out of the darkness and as softly give place to winter once more.

OLDPORT WHARVES.
Everyone who comes to a wharf feels an impulse to follow it down, and
look from the end. There is a fascination about it. It is the point of
contact between land and sea. A bridge evades the water, and unites
land with land, as if there were no obstacle. But a wharf seeks the water,
and grasps it with a solid hand. It is the sign of a lasting friendship;

once extended, there it remains; the water embraces it, takes it into its
tumultuous bosom at high tide, leaves it in peace at ebb, rushes back to
it eagerly again, plays with it in sunshine, surges round it in storm,
almost crushing the massive thing. But the pledge once given is never
withdrawn. Buildings may rise and fall, but a solid wharf is almost
indestructible. Even if it seems destroyed, its materials are all there.
This shore might be swept away, these piers be submerged or dashed
asunder, still every brick and stone would remain. Half the wharves of
Oldport were ruined in the great storm of 1815. Yet not one of them
has stirred from the place where it lay; its foundations have only spread
more widely and firmly; they are a part of the very pavement of the
harbor, submarine mountain ranges, on one of which yonder schooner
now lies aground. Thus the wild ocean only punished itself, and has
been embarrassed for half a century, like many another mad profligate,
by the wrecks of what it ruined.
Yet the surges are wont to deal very tenderly with these wharves. In
summer the sea decks them with floating weeds, and studs them with
an armor of shells. In the winter it surrounds them with a smoother mail
of ice, and the detached piles stand white and gleaming, like the
out-door palace of a Russian queen. How softly and eagerly this
coming tide swirls round them! All day the fishes haunt their shadows;
all night the phosphorescent water glimmers by them, and washes with
long, refluent waves along their sides, decking their blackness with a
spray of stars.
Water seems the natural outlet and discharge for every landscape, and
when we have followed down this artificial promontory, a wharf, and
have seen the waves on three sides of us, we have taken the first step
toward circumnavigating the globe. This is our last terra firma. One
step farther, and there is no possible foothold but a deck, which tilts
and totters beneath our feet. A wharf, therefore, is properly neutral
ground for all. It is a silent hospitality, understood by all nations. It is in
some sort a thing of universal ownership. Having once built it, you
must grant its use to everyone; it is no trespass to land upon any man's
wharf.
The sea, like other beautiful savage creatures, derives most of its charm
from its reserves of untamed power. When a wild animal is subdued to
abjectness, all its interest is gone. The ocean is never thus humiliated.

So slight an advance of its waves would overwhelm us, if only the
restraining power once should fail, and the water keep on rising! Even
here, in these safe haunts of commerce, we deal with the same salt tide
which I myself have seen ascend above these piers, and which within
half a century drowned a whole family in their home upon our Long
Wharf.
It is still the same ungoverned ocean which, twice in every twenty-four
hours, reasserts its right of way, and stops only where it will. At
Monckton, on the Bay of Fundy, the wharves are built forty feet high,
and at ebb-tide you may look down on the schooners lying aground
upon the mud below. In six hours they will be floating at your side. But
the motions of the tide are as resistless whether its rise be six feet or
forty; as in the lazy stretching of the caged lion's paw you can see all
the terrors of his